Not that sort of ring

The Nine Bishops who wrote an open letter protesting that it was wrong to appoint a celibate gay as bishop of Reading last week have got themselves a nickname. They are known to their opponents as the Nazgul.


I don’t want to write any more about this story, which has consumed an enormous amount of my time over the last week for very little reward. I have done some opinion pieces and a canned appearance on Newsnight, but there really isn’t very much to say about something that I just don’t begin to understand.

The two essential points that no one has mentioned in public so far are that the Prime Minister’s appointments secretary is gay, and so is the Bishop of Reading who is being replaced by the gay bishop about whom all the fuss is being made.

Apart from that, the story makes perfect sense.

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5 Responses to Not that sort of ring

  1. Rupert says:

    My father, who is as retired as the CofE lets any aged priest be, still maintains that ‘I’ve never met a homosexual, and wouldn’t know one if I did’. Which is arrant balderdash, given he was at Cambridge in the 50s and has had to minister to various parishioners in all manner of sexual hot water, but it’s symptomatic.

    There’s not much call for an IT journalist to write about gay bishops, so I’ve had to be content with fulminating about the sheer surreal unpleasantness of it all in pubs, online and to random passengers on the Tube. It’s enough to make a chap start up a mission to Africa… no, hold on, isn’t that where we came in?

    R

  2. el Patron says:

    A throwaway horror in the links off Electrolite: one of those stories about the American Christian Right that you read thinking it has to be fiction.

    No. They’re really there. And they’ve started a war with Islam. But that’s all right. God loves them because they’re not gay.

  3. Simon Sarmiento says:

    Rupert here’s a helpful hint 🙂

    I have just written a piece for the Church Crimes on spam, using as my example of material that would get trapped accidentally in a filter a quote from the Bishop of Carlisle. I’m sure they won’t print it as written, but I did enjoy using it… you might have better luck.

    Simon

  4. Oliver Morton says:

    Do they get bound in the darkness? I do hope so.

    Incidentally, fine LotR yucks to be had at McSeeneys, http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2003/04/22fellowship.html

  5. Rupert says:

    Simon —

    Ta. I must defrost my freelance head from cryogenic storage and see if I can hollow it out for use as an escape pod…

    R ‘would you like your metaphor shaken or stirred?’ G

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